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Eleanor Ross Taylor (1920–2011)

Eleanor Ross Taylor was a
poet, short-fiction author, and literary critic. An award-winning writer, she
was born in North Carolina but has spent the last several decades working and
publishing from her homes in Gainesville, Florida, and Charlottesville, Virginia. Widow of the noted
short-fiction author and novelist Peter Taylor (1917–1994), Taylor is associated with a literary circle
that includes figures such as Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and Robert Penn
Warren. She died in 2011. MORE...

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Taylor was born in 1920 in North Carolina, where as a young girl her poetry was
first published in the Norwood News and then in the
Sunshine Pages of the depression-era Charlotte Observer. She was
educated at the Women's College of the University of North Carolina (now the
University of North Carolina at Greensboro) and Vanderbilt University. She met
Peter Taylor through writers Allen and Caroline Gordon Tate, who had mentored
her in college, and the couple married in 1943. Peter Taylor taught at a number
of colleges, including Kenyon College, the University of Virginia, and the University of North Carolina, where
the couple became close friends with Randall Jarrell and his wife, Mackie,
sharing a duplex with them for a time. Peter Taylor encouraged his wife to show
her poems to Randall Jarrell, who in turn helped her submit them to various
literary magazines and wrote the introduction to her first book, Wilderness of Ladies (1960).

Though she said she put her role as wife and mother ahead of her writing career,
Taylor subsequently produced four additional volumes of poetry: WelcomeEumenides (1972), New and Selected
Poems (1983), Days Going/Days Coming Back
(1991), and Late Leisure (1999). These works earned her
the Poetry Society of America's Shelly Memorial Prize (1997–1998), a fellowship
with the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1998), the Library of Virginia's
Literary Award for Poetry (2000), and the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American
Poetry (2001). She also published a handful of short stories, including one in
Best American Short Stories. Peter Taylor died in
1994 after retiring from a teaching post at the University of Virginia. Eleanor
Ross Taylor lived in Charlottesville, then moved to Falls Church, where she died
on December 30, 2011.

Taylor's poetry is most often compared to
that of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marianne Moore. "[O]f course I
loved Emily Dickinson and read a lot of Emily Dickinson early," Taylor remarked
in 2002 interview with Blackbird, "but the
first poet that really made me feel that poetry was contemporary and could
relate to me right now, in the way that you know that all those wonderful
heroines of poetry and heroes do, was Edna St. Vincent Millay. I read her as a
teenager in school and just fell in love with her poems. I think it gave me a
feeling of being able to approach current, everyday life." The southernness of
her background made her tend to rein in her formidable intellect and biting wit
with an uneasy deference to form and convention. This tension can be found in
her use of both metrical and nonmetrical lines. Just when the organization of
her poems seems on the verge of wavering, she returns to the restraint with
which most of them begin.

The poet Adrienne Rich observed that Taylor's works "speak of the underground
life of women, the Southern white Protestant woman in particular, the
woman-writer, the woman in the family, coping, hoarding, preserving, observing,
keeping up appearances, seeing through the myths and hypocrisies, nursing the
sick, conspiring with sister-women, possessed of a will to survive and to see
others survive." From these many specific, place-based subjects and themes
emerged a voice concerned with timeless, archetypal questions.

Major Works

Wilderness of Ladies (1960)

Welcome Eumenides (1972)

New and Selected Poems (1983)

Days Going/Days Coming Back (1991)

Late Leisure: Poems (1999)

Time Line

June 30, 1920
- Eleanor Ross is born in Norwood, North Carolina.

1943
- Peter Taylor and Eleanor Ross marry in Sewanee, Tennessee.

1960
- Eleanor Ross Taylor's first book of poetry, Wilderness of Ladies, is published.